Within the art, call centers are an important element in providing customer service for a variety of industries. A large call center will have thousands of agents working at any given time. One of the problems in the management of the call center is that the peak times when the maximum number of agents are required can be predicted but may only last an hour or two, if that long. The problem this presents to the management of the call center is in having to have a number of agents present working eight hour shifts to handle these brief peak periods. One of the ways that this problem has been solved in the prior art is to utilize remote agents interconnected to the call center management system but who are working at home. This allows the agents to work part-time and to remain in their own home.
In a modern call center, for an agent to perform their activities they not only need audio communication with the customer or client who is being assisted but also they need to access a central base to obtain the necessary information in order to provide the desired assistance. Within the prior art it is known to remote agents via digital transmission systems such as the Internet or other forms of wide area networking. The secondary advantage of utilizing a digital transmission scheme for both voice and data is that long distance telephone charges are normally avoided while the agent is working. A remote agent utilizes a computer, such as a personal computer, that is being used as an IP Softphone. The personal computer both communicates the necessary data to and from the remote agent as well audio information. Whereas conceptually the interconnection of remote agents into a call center management system via a digital transmission media such as the Internet is attractive, but a digital network outrage will cause the connection between the remote agent and the client to be interrupted and lost. The result is that the client then has to redial the call center management system and be placed into a waiting queue until the same or another agent can assist them.
Within the prior art, it is known to provide only the data over the digital transmission system for the utilization of the remote agent and to provide an audio communication link via the public telephone switching network. The disadvantage of this system is the requirement to have both a data transmission link and a telephone link active at the same time. In addition, long distance charges may accrue on the public telephone switching network link.
In addition, wireless switching systems (also referred to as cellular systems) are known to suffer from calls being disconnected due to call path interruptions. Such interruptions require one of the two parties to reestablish the call.